THE INTERNATIONAL
FNB MOVEMENT

Food Not Bombs began in the early 1980s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, a city adjacent to Boston, when a group of anti-nuclear activists, who were protesting the nearby Seabrook power plant, began spray-painting the slogan Money for food, not for bombs around the city. The slogan was shortened to Food Not Bombs, and it became the name of their group. Soon after, they decided to put their slogan into practice. At a meeting of wealthy bank executives who were financing nuclear power projects, the group showed up and started handing out free food outside to a crowd of three hundred homeless people. The action was so successful that the group began doing it on a regular basis, collecting surplus food from grocery stores and preparing it into meals.

Today, there are more than 400 chapters of Food Not Bombs listed on the www.foodnotbombs.net website, with about half the chapters active outside the United States. Food Not Bombs has a loose structure: every chapter of Food Not Bombs embraces a few basic principles, and carries out the same sort of action, but every chapter is free to make its own decisions, based on the needs of its community. Likewise, every chapter of Food Not Bombs operates on consensus: everybody has an equal say in making decisions. Besides collecting and distributing food for free, most chapters of Food Not Bombs are involved in community anti-poverty, anti-war and pro-immigrant organizing, as well as many other political causes.

Read more about FNB history.